The Riddle of Man

Riddle of Man: German Idealism: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

On-line since: 5th October, 2006

German Idealism's Picture
of the World

Idealism as a View About
Nature and the Spirit:Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

At the beginning of his search for
a world view, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling is close to Fichte
insofar as the same picture of the soul — whose grasping of itself
in the activity of self-awakening assures it of existence — becomes
for him the sure support of knowledge. But from this basic feeling in
Schelling's spirit different thoughts stream forth than from Fichte's
spirit. For Fichte, the all-encompassing world-will shines into the
awakening soul as a spiritual realm of light; and he wants to know the
rays of this light in their essential being. For Schelling, the world
riddle consists in the fact that he sees himself, with his soul awakened
to egohood, confronted by a seemingly mute and lifeless nature. Out of
this nature the soul awakens. This fact reveals itself to human
observation. And the knowing, feeling human spirit delves down into this
nature and through this nature fills itself with an inner world that then
becomes spiritual life within it. Could this be so if there did not exist
between the soul and nature a deeply inward relatedness at first hidden
from human cognition? But nature remains mute if the soul does not make
itself into the instrument of nature's speech; nature seems dead if the
spirit of man does not free life from the spell of semblance
(Schein). The secrets of nature must sound forth from the depths of
the human soul. But in order for this not to be a deception, it must be
the essential being of nature itself that speaks out of the human soul.
And it must be true that the soul only seemingly goes down into its own
depths when it knows nature; in actuality, when it wants to find nature,
the soul must travel through subconscious passages in order to delve down
with its own life into the cycle of nature's weaving.

Schelling sees in nature
— as it is present to ordinary human consciousness — only a
physiognomical expression of true nature, so to speak, just as one sees in
a human countenance the expression of the supersensible soul. And just
as one lives into the soul of a person through this physiognomical
expression — if one is able to take up the other person's
experiences into one's own — so, for Schelling, there is a
possibility of so awakening human cognitive abilities that they experience
within themselves what works and weaves behind the outer countenance
of nature as soul and spirit. Therefore, one cannot consider our science
of this outer countenance to be a revelation of what lives in the depths
of nature; nor is the cognitive power of man that is limited to such
science capable of unraveling the true secrets of nature. Schelling
therefore wants to bring to awakening in the human soul an intellectual
beholding (intellektuelle Anschauung) that lies behind the
ordinary cognitive power of man. This kind of beholding reveals itself
— in Schelling's sense — as a creative power in man; but
in such a way that it does not create concepts from the soul about
nature, but rather, through inward co-existence with the soul element of
nature, brings to manifestation the powers of ideas creating and ruling
in nature. Fearful souls quake at the thought of a view of nature that is
supposed to stem from this kind of an “intellectual beholding.”
And the scorn and ridicule heaped upon it in the period after Schelling
was great. For someone who knows how to avoid one-sidedness in these
matters, there need not be the two conflicting alternatives: either to
surrender to “the daydreams of nature fantasies like those of a
Schelling” and bring a charge of “gross materialism”
against proper, serious natural science; or maturely to take the
stand-point of this science and “dismiss all Schellingian playing
with concepts as childishness.” One can belong unreservedly to those
who want to promote natural science to the full as demanded by our modern
“natural-scientific age”; and one can nevertheless understand
the justification for Schelling's attempt to create, above and beyond this
natural science, a view of nature that enters an area that this natural
science will not want to touch at all if it rightly understands itself.
But the belief is unjustified which asserts that, besides the
natural science created by our ordinary cognitive powers, there can exist
no view of nature that is attained by means different from those
particular to this natural science as such. Why must the natural
scientist believe that his field is safe only if everyone else
striving from a different point of view is silenced? For someone who will
not let himself be blinded in these matters by “natural-scientific
fanaticism,” the often so bitter rejection of a view of nature more
in accordance with the spirit — such as that for which Schelling
strove — seems no different, after all, than if a lover of
photography were to say: “I make exact pictures of people that
reproduce everything about them: just don't try to compare the portrait
a painter makes with my kind of faithfulness to nature.”

With
awakened spiritual beholding Schelling wanted to find the “spirit
of nature,” for which not only sense perception but also what
one calls laws of nature are merely the physiognomical expression. It
is important that we place before our souls the enormous impression
he made in such strivings upon those of his contemporaries who had an
open heart for the way this striving burst forth from his powerful,
spirit-illuminated personality. There is a description, given by an
amiable and gifted thinker, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, of the impressions
he received of Schelling's effect in Jena. “What was it,”
he writes, “that so powerfully drew both young and old from far
and near to attend his lectures? Was it only the personality of the
man or the particular charm of his speaking style that had such power
to attract people? ... It wasn't that alone. ... In his lively words
there lay, to be sure, an inspiring power irresistible to young souls
with any receptivity at all. It might be difficult to make comprehensible
to a reader in our day,” (Schubert is now writing down in 1854
what he had experienced about Schelling in the 1790's) “who
did not participate in and hear this as a young person like I did, how
it often affected me when Schelling spoke to us: I felt as though I
were reading or hearing Dante, the seer in another world open only to
the initiated eye. The mighty content that lay in his words —
which themselves were measured, mathematically precise, and of an elegance
suitable for inscription in stone — seemed to me like a bound
Prometheus, presenting the understanding spirit with the task of loosing
his bonds and receiving from his hand the unquenchable fire. ... But
neither his personality nor the enlivening power of his speaking style
could account for the interest and excitement — for or against
his direction in thought — aroused by Schelling's world view
immediately after it was made public in his writings; no other literary
publication of this kind, long before or after, aroused such interest
and excitement. When a teacher or writer speaks about sense-perceptible
things or natural phenomena, one can tell right away whether he is doing
so out of his own observation and experience or merely repeating what
he has heard others say — or even what he has thought up out of
pictures of his own. ... And it is the same with inner experience. There
is a reality of a higher kind, whose existence can be experienced by
the knowing spirit in us with the same sureness and certainty as our
body, through its senses, experiences the existence of outer visible
nature. This nature — the reality of bodily things — presents
itself to our perceiving senses as a deed of that same creative
power through which our bodily nature has also come about. The existence
of the visible world is an actual fact in the same way as the existence
of the perceiving senses. Reality of a higher kind, as a spiritually
embodied fact, has also approached the knowing spirit in us; our knowing
spirit will become aware of this reality when its own knowing activity
lifts itself to a recognition of that by which our spirit is known and
from which, according to a common, regular order, there emerges the
reality of both bodily and spiritual evolution. And this becoming aware
of a spiritual, divine reality in which we ourselves live, weave, and
exist is the highest gain of earthly life and of the search for wisdom.
... Already in my day, among the young people who heard Schelling, there
were some who had an inkling of what he meant by the ‘intellectual
beholding’ through which our spirit must grasp the infinite primal
ground of all being and becoming.”

It was
the spirit in nature that Schelling sought through intellectual beholding,
the spiritual that, from the power of its creativity, brought forth
nature. Nature was once the living body of this spiritual, just as the
human body is so for the soul. Now it is spreading out, this body of the
world spirit, revealing in its traits what once the spiritual incorporated
into it, and showing, in its weaving and becoming, gestures that represent
the workings of the spiritual. This spiritual working within the world
body had to precede the present state of the world, so that this world
body could grow hard and produce in the mineral realm a bony system,
in the plant realm a nervous system, in the animal realm a soul forerunner
of man. In this way the world body was led out of its youth into its old
age; the present-day mineral, plant, and animal realms are, so to speak,
the hardened products of what once was accomplished, in a spiritually
embodied way, by an evolution that is now extinguished. Out of the womb
of the aged body of the world, however, the creative spirituality could
allow the soul and spirit-endowed human being to arise; within his inner
life there shine forth to his knowledge the ideas with which the creative
spirituality first brought about the world body. As though enchanted,
there lies within present-day nature the spirit that once lived and
worked in it; within the human soul this spirit becomes disenchanted.
(This presentation of Schelling's relationship to nature is certainly
not to be found in any actual words or even in any thoughts used by
Schelling himself. Nevertheless, I believe that one can truly
reproduce a person's view with such conciseness only if one fixes
one's eye upon the spirit of his view, and, in order to express
this spirit, uses mental pictures arising in a free way to say in a
few words what the original personality expressed in a series of extensive
works. Used to this end, the actual words of the personality can only
misrepresent the spirit of these words.)

Taking
this stance toward the “spirit of nature” and its relationship
to the human spirit, Schelling felt himself faced by the necessity of
learning how to understand that element in the world which intrudes
upon and disrupts the course of world events. Insofar as the soul gives
itself over to the world of ideas holding sway in everything, the soul
will knowingly experience the progressive creativity of this world of
ideas. But, as though from a different direction of world existence,
a disruptive, evil, malevolent element forces its way in. With the world
of ideas the knowing soul does not at first enter this different field;
this field borders on the world of ideas as the shadow borders on the
light. Just as the light cannot be present in a shadowed space, so also
the activities undertaken by the soul in its first attempts in knowledge
cannot be present in the realm of disruption, evil, and malevolence.
In seeking a possibility of penetrating into this region, Schelling
received a stimulus from that personality who, out of the simplest feeling
life of the German people, sought the solution for lofty riddles of
the world: Jakob Böhme. To be sure, Jakob Böhme did read a
lot about questions concerning world views and also did take up a great
deal in other ways through the educational channels available to a simple
man of the people in the German culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries; but the best thing that pulses through Jakob Böhme's
writings in such an unlearned way is a popular path of knowledge; what is
best there comes from the deeper heart (Gemüt) of the people
itself. And Schelling lifted up into the mode of thinking contemplation
what was seen by this deeper heart of the people in Jakob Böhme's
unlearned but enlightened soul. It belongs to the most magnificent
observations one can make in world literature to see Jakob Böhme's
elemental heart's view shining through the philosophical language of
Schelling's
Treatise on the Essential Being of Man's Freedom.
[1]
Within this elemental heart's view, the profound insight holds
sway that no one can arrive at a satisfying world view whose only means
on the path of knowledge are those of thinking comprehension.
Out of the depths of the world, something bursts into the circumference
of what thinking comprehension is; this something is more far-reaching
and powerful than thinking comprehension, but not more powerful actually
than what the soul can experience within itself when thinking comprehension
appears to the soul only as a part of the soul's own essential
being. If one wants to comprehend something, one must understand how
this something is necessarily connected with something else.
The things of the world are indeed connected to each other necessarily
on the surface, but not in the deepest foundation of the world's
essential being. Freedom holds sway in the world. And only he comprehends
the world who beholds free, supersensible spirituality holding sway
within the necessitated course taken by the laws of nature. Freedom
as a fact can always be refuted by logical reasons. Whoever realizes
this is not impressed by any refutation of the idea of freedom.

Jakob Böhme's
thoroughly healthy way of knowledge — his original deeper heart's
knowledge, so in accordance with the feeling of the people —
beheld freedom as weaving and working through everything necessitated,
working even through natural necessity. And Schelling, ascending from
a view of nature in accordance with the spirit to a beholding
of the spirit, felt himself in harmony with Jakob Böhme.

And with
this the path was given him for beholding the historical evolution of
the spirituallife of mankind in his own way. The deed of Christ fitted
into this evolution as the greatest event on earth. Through his
Philosophy of Mythology
Schelling sought to understand what had occurred before this deed.
Whoever believes that in history only ideas that follow necessarily from
each other are revealed, does not understand the course of the world.
For with freedom supersensible being reaches into this course from stage
to stage; and what freedom accomplishes at each new stage can only be
beheld as a fact revealed to the deeper heart (Germüt);
it cannot be thought up beforehand, by logical deduction from the evolution
of ideas until then, as a necessitated next stage. And what
supersensible worlds, in the evolution of the earth, have let stream
in through Christ must be taken as a completely free fact; not as a
revelation needing illumination by ideas, but as a revelation shining
out over any world of ideas. Schelling wants to speak about this world
view of his in his
Philosophy of Revelation.

Certainly,
the “contradiction” in which this way of picturing things
gets entangled is easy to point out. And this “contradiction”
was held up to Schelling in every possible form, both well-meaning and
malicious. Nevertheless, whoever raises this “contradiction”
only shows that he does not want to recognize the reigning of free
spirituality in the course of a world process that seems necessitated.
Schelling did not want to deny the working of natural necessity; but he
wanted to show how even this necessity is a deed of the spirituality that
works through the world with freedom. And he did not want, as it were, to
renounce comprehension just because the first attempts of this
comprehension shatter upon the boundary of world freedom; he wanted to
ascend to a comprehension of what the world of ideas holding sway in
everything does not have within itself but can take up into itself.
The ideas that want to know the world do not need to bow out just because
mere thinking comprehension is inadequate for knowledge of
life. One need not say: Because ideas, with what at first lies within
their own being, do not penetrate into the depths of the world, therefore
the depths of the world cannot be known. No, when ideas give themselves
over to these depths and become permeated by what ideas do not have
in themselves, then these ideas rise up from the ground of the world,
newborn and wafted through by the essential being of the “spirit
of the world.”

From
the seventeenth century, the deeper heart of the German people in the
Görlitz shoemaker Jakob Böhme, working on in Schelling's
philosophical spirit, arrived at a world view like this in the nineteenth
century.

Notes:

1.Freiheit literally means
“freehood.” Freiheit does not focus so much on
“freedom” from something. It means activating the spiritual
forces of one's own “I.” For Rudolf Steiner, freedom is
“action, thinking, and feeling from out of the spiritual
individuality of man”; it is “spiritual activity.”
– Ed.